The past is never dead. It's not even past
President Harry S. Truman is a wild card in historians’ dueling storylines about the atomic bombings of Japan at the end of World War II. For “orthodox” historians, Truman and his advisors let casualty projections, Japanese governmental paralysis, and American public opinion lead them to a coldly rational decision to drop the terrifying new weapons […]
The Floating World: Masterpieces of Edo Japan from the Worcester Art Museum, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Over one hundred ink-and-paper survivors from “the floating world” of Edo-period Japan are on display at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas. This diverse collection of woodblock prints, many of them strikingly colorful […]
It’s a three-hour, ultra-big-screen, deeply-researched box office mega-hit about… J. Robert Oppenheimer, project manager. Leslie Groves, the manager’s manager. Kitty Oppenheimer, the manager’s kids’ manager. Lewis Strauss, the wanna-be manager. Harry Truman, the buck-stops-here manager. James Byrnes, President Truman’s manager. The scientists of the Manhattan Project were thoroughly unmanageable. The bomb? It was everybody’s fault, […]
An orphaned boy and girl wander helplessly through a destroyed Japanese city toward the end of World War II. The boy, older but not old enough, has frustrating interactions with the adults they meet, most of whom are preoccupied with their own struggles to survive. Despite his earnest efforts, he cannot keep his little sister […]
A child of poverty, luckless in love, her hour upon the stage mostly lost to history, and dead before the age of 25: all too true for Chinese silent film star Ruan Lingyu. Yet there was also a prophecy that “her artistry will one day serve all mankind,” and this too has proved true. The […]
My favorite director made a movie about my PhD dissertation topic 70 years before I wrote about it. The problem was that I didn’t find out about it until I was several years into my alt-ac career. Discovering the movie was the catalyst I needed to write a book I never thought I’d write. OK, […]
Grave of the Fireflies (1988) is an uncompromising critique of Japanese society in the waning months of World War II, and a major milestone in the development of one of the world's foremost animation studios.
It’s strange that of the two most famous war-related museums in Japan, the one in Hiroshima, within sight of the untouched-since-1945 “Atomic Bomb Dome” that provides a stark reminder of the city’s destruction, is the more palatable
I lived near the port city of Kesennuma, in northeastern Japan, from 2006 to 2008. That was several years before the event they call 3/11. That's March 11, 2011, the day a record-setting earthquake and tsunami devastated the area and cost over 18,000 lives.
Before John Dower's Embracing Defeat, many English-language accounts of the United States’ occupation of Japan contextualized the event in terms of American foreign policy and the emerging Cold War. Scholars writing from this Western-centric perspective produced much fine scholarship, and no doubt will continue to do so.